From a discussion I just had with a colleague a couple of minutes ago...
The guy was bewildered because XFrames was being put forward instead of frames
just being deprecated in their entirety. I agreed, and put forth the idea
that if XInclude were in the spec, we wouldn't need frames at all.
Frames are largely good for two things:
1. Scrolling one piece of content without moving another.
2. Putting common bits of content in separate files, so that the browser
can cache the static bits while you focus on delivering only the bit
which is different.
The first of these can be done with CSS using "overflow: scroll" on the part
which you want to scroll relative to everything else.
But as for putting content in separate files, first we thought that XInclude
would be neat because it does exactly this.
Then the obvious struck us... XHTML2 has the Embedding Attributes module. Can
we not use these attributes to include the common parts of a site?
e.g.:
<html>
<!-- Skipping the <head> for brevity. -->
<body>
<div class="sitemenu">
<div type="text/html" src="sitemenu.html"/>
</div>
<div class="content">
<!-- Static content would go here. -->
</div>
<div class="copyright">
<div type="text/html" src="copyright.html"/>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Two questions:
1. Is this a perceived, or a sensible, usage of the Embedding Attributes?
2. If this were used, would the HTML files pointed to by the "src"
attribute be full XHTML2 files, or would they contain merely the
fragment which is to be included?
If this is a sensible usage, the an example should be added to the
specification to cover this usage.
TX
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Email: Trejkaz Xaoza <trejkaz@xaoza.net>
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